It's Complicated

It's complicated.

"What's complicated?" you ask.

Given the era that we live and the many demands of modern life, nearly everything is complicated to some degree.  But this isn't a rant about modern life and a desire to return to simpler times, as appealing as that may some times be.

What is complicated today, in ways that I could not have conceived of at the beginning of 2017, are relationships within my family and the consequent ways that Robin I feel led to pray for our family.

Each night we read from the Bible, aloud, and then pray together.  If you divided our prayer time in two, in the first part we pray for our family and in the second we pray for a variety of other things, such as the needs of people within our congregation and our community, and people and circumstances outside of our immediate family.  If we consider the aspect of praying for our family we could divide that into four groups, being Robin and I, our children, our grandchildren, and our parents. 

Praying for ourselves and our parents is perhaps the simplest, as there are just two of us and we have two parents each.  To the parent group we also include two others in our family of that generation that are dear in particular ways.  That part is not particularly complicated.

But when we get to our children, things get a bit more tangled.  Two children each from our first marriages, plus one fiancé, plus the daughter we adopted.  This is perhaps more complex, but not quite complicated.  This is, however, where "complicated" takes off, like a rocket!

Early in our marriage we also prayed for certain people connected to our children, such as spouses and significant others who were the parents of our grandchildren.  Without getting specifically into the "how's" and "why's" I'll just say that at the beginning of the summer of 2017 in the level of "our children" there were 16 additional people to the six already mentioned.  And in the group of our grandchildren there were 26 children.

Several of our grandchildren have been in foster care and we met the foster parents over the summer, adding them and their children to our lists.  And then in September we took two children in for foster care, adding them, their siblings and their parents to our lists.  And so as Thanksgiving draws near the list of our children has 27 names and the list of our grandchildren has 32 children.  The best way I can describe the connection of those relationships to someone who is hearing about it for the first time is "It's complicated!"

I suspect that it's a collection of relationships that is far from the norm by just about any conceivable standard.  At no point in my life before the age of 50 could I have possibly imagined that one day the collection of people I think of as "my family" would look like this.  But it does, and these are the people Robin and I feel led to pray for each day.

The relationships that bind our family may be complicated.  And, like any family, the distance, physically and emotionally, between us and each of them, has wide variations.  But each day we bring each of them to the Lord.  In some case we know their needs well but in many we don't.  But we know that God is good, that He answers prayer in His timing and in ways that are always for the best.  

Our family may be complicated, but in the eyes of the Lord, the needs of the various members are not, so that at day's end, in all things, family and otherwise, we trust in the Lord Jesus Christ.